Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a file which contains certain records about users. the row length is always fixed to 205 characters.
Now I want to read each record line from the file, substring some portion out of it and put into another file. But I have observed that my script is trimming the extra spaces I have used for padding the records in order to keep the record lengths constant.
this is what I'm using :

Code:

while read line; 
    do  
        echo $line | cut -c6-12 >> $USER_NAME_FILE; 
    done < $FILE

the following input lines :

Code:

12345 Pramit 6789
25789   Amit 1234

give the following output:

Code:

 Pramit
 Amit 1

But I need only Amit in the second output.
Please help.

Moderator's Comments:

Video tutorial on how to use code tags in The UNIX and Linux Forums.

If you need only the second column, go with field extractor ..

Code:

$ cut -d' ' -f2 < infile
Pramit
Amit

Double-quote the variable (echo "$line").

Or this:

Code:

cut -d' ' -f2 < infile > outfile

Based on jayan_jay's post!

I suggest you to use "awk" instead of "cut":

Code:

awk '{print $2}' infile
# Or
awk '{print substr($0, 7, 5)}' infile
# Or, maybe, you have an error with the positions in your cut
cut -c7-11 infile

I hope it helps.

Thanks to everyone... your effort really saved my time. .. Thanks again